Aave Founder Returns to Twitter After Ban-Worthy Joke

Aave founder Stani Kulechov returned to Twitter today following a tweet that earned him a fifteen-hour suspension.

Aave Founder Claims to Be Twitter CEO

On Tuesday, Apr. 26, Kulechov jokingly posted a tweet that read “BREAKING: Joining Twitter as interim CEO.”

Later, Kulechov pretended to thank Twitter owner Elon Musk for the opportunity. Kulechov went on to post a false roadmap mirroring some of Musk’s own goals, including plans to introduce an edit button and open-source Twitter’s algorithms.

Kulechov also suggested that Twitter would integrate Ethereum, the Ethereum Name System (ENS), and his own Lens Protocol—none of which the special media company actually plans to partner with.

It seems that Twitter was not amused by the joke and decided to ban Kulechov from the platform over his false claims.

During his absence from the platform, Kulechov confirmed in a statement that “Twitter, recently bought by Elon Musk, [had] chosen to suspend [his] account” and complained that long-standing profiles can be deleted on “the whim of a centralized platform.”

Now, Twitter has apparently chosen to restore Kulechov’s account and will allow his tweets to remain. Kulechov doubled down on the joke, writing today: “I’m back as interim CEO of Twitter.”

Can Social Media Be Fully Open?

Though Kulechov has criticized Twitter’s overly-strict content policies, it also appears that he does not believe that Elon Musk’s plans for a decentralized Twitter go far enough.

Kulechov noted that Musk has claimed that Twitter “should be an unregulated global town [square].” However, he argues that even Musk’s plans would leave Twitter a “centralized force that could close its doors to people of their choosing.”

He says that if Musk truly treated Twitter as a town square, then the platform “would be owned by the public as well.”

Kulechov took this opportunity to promote his own social media platform, the blockchain-based Lens Protocol, as a solution. Lens Protocol allows users to move between different sub-platforms; users also own their profiles and posts as NFTs that cannot be deleted.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and other cryptocurrencies.

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